One of the most compelling questions in the field of pidgins and creoles consists in identifying the linguistic sources and cognitive forces that shape a given creole: why does a particular creole look and sound the way it does? Where do its linguistic properties come from? What are the original populations and languages that contributed to its genesis? The investigation of such questions hopes to shed light on how the mind pulls together linguistic materials from distinct sources to form a creole, and to reveal the nature of the cognitive processes involved in creole formation. Recent developments in language contact studies combined with the findings in other disciplines like developmental psychology are contributing to a better understanding of how creole languages emerge and develop.

Topics in this course will include:

socio-historical contexts of creole genesis and how a distinct history of population contact results in distinct structural outcomes;

examination of the morpho-syntactic properties of a set of creole languages;

identification of the cognitive processes (L1 and L2 acquisition) that contributed to the emergence of specific features. On this issue, we focus particularly on the process of convergence in creole formation and demonstrate how such a hypothesis can be experimentally tested.

Syllabi are available to current LSA students. IMPORTANT: These syllabi are provided to give students a general idea about the courses, as offered by LSA departments and programs in prior academic terms. The syllabi do not necessarily reflect the assignments, sequence of course materials, and/or course expectations that the faculty and departments/programs have for these same courses in the current and/or future terms.